Asura’s Wrath Review

Asura’s Wrath is a recent venture by Capcom with developer CyberConnect2. For those of you who played the demo you will understand at least a bit why i say this.

Asura’s Wrath is awesome. The end.

This game is more of an anime style movie than a game, but i LOVE it. The story telling in this game is beyond awesome, It starts out with a demigod named Asura, one of the Eight Guardian Generals, fighting a war against the impure Ghoma. After the first encounter and subsequent driving back of the ultimate Ghoma Vlitra, Asura returns home to his family and is immediately summoned to see the emperor. Upon reaching the emporer Asura finbds out that he is dead on his feet and Asura gets blamed for the death. Fighting his way past the guard to reach his family he arrives only to find his wife dying and his daughter taken. The commander of the Eight Guardian Generals Deus has taken his daughter because as priestess she has the ability to amplify the mantra that they use as power. In a rage Asura confronts Deus in an attempt to free his daughter and is soundly defeated by Deus and thrown to earth where he remains in a state of death for 12,000 years.

The whole story is a fast paced, rage filled, journey that keeps you entertained. Asura is a rage fuled man on a singular journey of rescuing his daughter and destroying everything that trys to stop him or even slow him down. He doesn’t care about the world, the gods, or their plan to “save” the world, all he wants is to assault his way back to the only person in existence that he cares about. The story telling is amazing but it is VERY linear, you dont get to explore, there arn’t hidden areas, or items to collect, you go where your told and you fuck shit up. That’s it.

Now the first thing I love about Asura’s Wrath are the various details of the story. They call them demigods but Asura’s arms are in fact robotic, don’t expect an explanation as to why he has robot arms cause you wont get it. This game blends together a mythology with a large dose of sci-fi as well, lots of giant warships, Flying motorbikes, the demigods all live on what can only be described as a space station, but then the people of the planet worship them, and their souls and prayers are used as power to operate the ships, weapons, and by the demigods themselves to defeat the Ghoma.

I personally found the narrative to be amazing, the story is engaging and i never really wanted to stop. Each chapter is divided into it’s own “episode” with recaps and cliff hanger endings that end with a “next time on Asura’s Wrath” type of outro giving you a brief narrative and preview of whats to come, much like a traditional anime. I honestly think if Dragon Ball Z and God of War got drunk one night and had a one night stand together at a sci-fi convention, the child would resemble Asura’s Wrath.

The Character animations are reminiscent of a comic book or graphic novel coloring style and it looks great. The whole game is game graphics, you wont really see scenes where the graphics get better because its a cutscene instead of gameplay, the 2 blend together so completely that i almost put my control down a few times only to have a QTE pop up throwing me back into the fighting and reminding me there are no breaks in this game. Now if you dont like QTE’s then maybe this game isn’t for you, but i don’t recommend letting that deter you from trying it out at least.

The one thing i found hard to suspend my disbelief of was the excessive damage of the planet during this game. Giant demon Vlitra burst forth from the center of the earth and creates a crater that is larger than Asia, The giant fat man who becomes larger than the earth and proceeds to poke it, or when the giant fat man explodes and rain fire down on over half the planet, or the sword attack that pierces through one side of the earth and comes out the other. After all of this can anyone tell me how ANYONE is still alive on this planet? all life should be obliterated at this point between the earthquakes, fire, tidal waves, etc. But i guess you just have to roll with the punches sometimes.

One downside to Asura’s Wrath is that it is a short game, took me about 9 hours to beat all the levels once through and be warned only about 1/2 of that is playable, but i do plan on replaying it on the other difficulties because it is pretty fun. Capcom has also announced 3 DLC episodes for this game that will expand on the story, as well as a rumored Asura vs Ryu from Street Fighter DLC.
I do have to repeat myself though, this game is a MUST PLAY, buy it, rent it, borrow it, just play it.